On the weekend I was down in the beautiful Bay of Plenty enjoying the start of summer.
As I was driving to Royal Palm Beach yesterday afternoon to drop my beautiful little boy home to his mum after a fantastic weekend I noticed that there are a lot more for sale signs out again.
I decided to take a bit of a tour around some of the areas that have traditionally favored the investment market and it seems there are more signs in these areas as well.
Could it be that news of tax reform is scaring a lot of people out of the investment market or is it just the usual Christmas rush with people taking the opportunity to list there homes when the weather is warm and everyone wants to move to the beach (It was definitely warm weather and I officially put the heaters out in the garage for the year)?
Certainly if you wanted to sell, now is a great time, as according to one article I read over the last week approximately 14,000 new houses a year were being built, but 25,000 were needed to match population growth. The means more demand than supply could be one of the reasons why prices, as seen by the Real Estate Institutes new figures, have inched up sooner than many people might have thought.
The Real Estate Institute released new figures which show that the current median price for a home in NZ is now $355,000 topping the previous peak of $352,000 which was hit in September of 2007 however these numbers could be quite short lived as funding is still very difficult for a nation that has a huge number of small businesses and self employed people.
Is it the right time to be selling? That’s up to you however I can say this, waiting to get a few extra dollars in price may actually cost you more than you think, for example, in the last year the median house price went up by 6%, according to those same figures released by the REINZ, yet many peoples mortgages are fixed at rates a lot higher than that add to this the possibility that you are buying and selling in the same market, so even if you wait for a higher price it just means the property you buy next is going to be more expensive.
